When Omar Khadr purportedly tossed the grenade that killed an American infantryman, he was neither child nor soldier.

When Omar Khadr purportedly tossed the grenade that killed an American infantryman, he was neither child nor soldier.

At 15, he was age-appropriate for marriage in Afghan culture and old enough to enter military service. But while it could be argued that the just-deposed Taliban regime still retained legitimate status as an armed force fighting the U.S.-led invasion, Khadr and his Al Qaeda-affiliated father weren't part of that combat structure.

They menaced under no internationally recognized definition of soldiering. Under Geneva Conventions, captured fighters are considered prisoners of war if they are members of an adversary state's armed forces or part of an identifiable militia group that abides by the laws of war.

By no stretch of imagination could that definition be extended to Al Qaeda, a purely terrorist entity that lacks even the moral cover of a broadly supported national insurgency.

Khadr, the lone Canadian and youngest enemy combatant still held at Guantanamo, is routinely presented by his advocates as a naïve whelp blown about by the winds of war, putatively innocent of any actionable crime and left to rot at an offshore detention facility, denied basic legal rights.

Yet Guantanamo, like it or loathe it, is a creation of the U.S. Congress, its status legislatively secure if unsavoury to many, even as numerous judicial challenges wind through American courts.

A few years back, I visited a repatriation camp for child soldiers in Uganda, youngsters who had been abducted by the Lord's Resistance Army and, in many instances, forced to murder their parents so they would never be accepted back into their villages. Some had found their own way, through the bush, to the camp. Others had been fetched by Ugandan troops. They were as young as 7 the girls repeatedly raped to further ostracizing. A small band of committed counsellors were struggling to reclaim their minds and bodies.

Those were child soldiers and all their sins must be forgiven.

Khadr may have been brainwashed by a wicked father but he's recanted none of it and has fired the American military lawyers who worked tirelessly on his case.

Still, Khadr can barely pass wind without his civil lawyers relaying the event to accommodating media.

The cause célèbre of Omar Khadr – distinguishing him from the more than 2,500 other Canadians being held in foreign jails, many in countries where justice is an alien concept – has been effectively afoot, stories regularly illustrated by that single photograph of Khadr as a teen, though he no longer remotely resembles that youth.

Artist sketches from the defendant's last appearance in court show a hulking and bearded adult but optics are more usefully massaged with the old picture.

The Canadian Bar Association recently threw its heft into the controversy by "demanding'' Ottawa vigorously pursue Khadr's release into Canadian custody, similar to arrangements made by Australia and Britain for their Guantanamo nationals. None of those detainees had been charged with murder, a fact of apparent insignificance to Khadr's apologists.

Extradition might be a decent denouement – if not for promulgation in Canada of the view that Khadr, with five years behind bars, has already spent enough time imprisoned. Five years for murder is apparently sufficient for someone 15 at the time.

Yet Lee Malvo Johnson, the teenage Beltway Sniper who really was moulded to murder, received a life sentence.

And, in Mississauga, the Bathtub Murder sisters – 15 and 17 when they drowned mom – got 10 years, six to be served in custody, the maximum youth sentence.

Guess it matters less when the victim is a soldier.

We have 2,500 of those in Afghanistan. Tell me any of their lives are worth just five years.

Rosie DiManno usually appears Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday.

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